1

Working with the Demented: Penguin's Proust, an Experimen t in

Collaborative Foreignization

by
James Grieve

abstract

Is the Penguin Proust, I wonder, the first important literary translation into
English to be much affected by a notion of 'foreignization'? In the mid-
1990s, Penguin Books decided to embark on a wholly new translation of
Marcel Proust's lengthy seven-part novel A la recherche du temps perdu, to
compete with the existing English version of C. K. Scott Moncrieff (revised
by Terence Kilmartin and D. J. Enright). The Penguin project was overseen
by a general editor, a professor of French literature at Cambridge, who
chose seven different translators, most of whom were also French scholars,
each of them to work on a separate section of the text. The project did not
evolve without difficulties, both inside Penguin and among the group of
translators. Some of these difficulties came from incompatibilities between
the working hypotheses of some members of the team. Some of these
members were literalists, some were also 'foreignizers', one or two were
neither. This paper, while offering a diagnosis of some of the disorders
suffered by the project, wonders whether it affords conclusions that might
be applicable to other collaborative translation projects.
 2

Working with the Demente d: Penguin' s Proust, an Experim ent in

Collaborative Foreignization

At the risk of disappointing some, I should explain that the word

'demente d' in my title refers not to those with whom I collabora ted on
Penguin's new translation of Proust, but to me, at least inferentially, in the
view of at least one of those collaborators. I hope no one thinks that my
manner here is too autobiographical. Since I see this as a report on an
experiment, from someone who was not only one of the experime nters but
also in a way a subject of the experiment, some measure of autobiogr aphy
is unavoidable.

Is the Penguin Proust, I wonder, the first important literary translation to

be much affected by a notion of 'foreigniz ation'? This is one of the focuses
of my remarks. Foreignization (I borrow the definition of Lawrence
Venuti) is 'a theory and practice of translation that resists dominant target-
language cultural values so as to signify the linguistic and cultural
difference of the foreign text' (The Translator's Invisibility, Routledg e, [lJ
1995, p. 23). The opposite of 'foreigniz ation' is called variously
'naturalis ation' or 'domestic ation'.

Marcel Proust (1871-1922) wrote little apart from the one magnum opus
of a novel that occupied him for about the last twelve years of his life, A la
recherche du temps perdu. When I speak here of translating Proust, it is
that single major work that I am referring to. It has seven major parts which
came out in Paris between 1913 and 1927, the last three of them being
published, more or less unrevised, after the writer's death. [2]

A la recherche du temps perdu was first translated into English in the

1920s by C. K. Scott Moncrieff. In the mid-1990s, Penguin Books decided
to embark on a wholly new translation of A la recherche du temps perdu,
to compete with the version of Scott Moncrieff, [3] revised in the early
1980s by Terence Kilmartin and again by D. J. Enright in the early 1990s.
As general editor of the new endeavour, Penguin appointed Christoph er
 3

Prendergast, a Professor of French then at Cambridge. It should be said

here that, in some respects, Penguin's thinking was better than that of
many other publishing houses who commission translations, in that their
contract allowed us a very generous deadline (three and a half years for r
~ri,{At{ 1· A
submission of definitive text), put ,.,.us on royalties ,~ nd gave . a generous
advance. . (l:
tv· I,,;.. ,1,..;,t.
J ,, '
<t",,i'~ !• • ..i t' ft'' '
t ➔- ,~T'\
)i
t~t ~'
Having translated the first part Du cote de chez Swann many years [3]
before (Swann 's Way, Canberra, 1982), I was invited to be one of initially
six translators who would work simultaneously on the book's seven parts.
The part I chose to translate for Penguin was the second, A l 'ombre des
jeunes filles en fl,eurs. My decision to be on this team was, I must confess,
half-hearted; and I joined it somewhat against my better judgment. Though
I could see it made good sense from a publisher's point of view, in that all
seven parts could be published at one go, rather than spread over possibly a
decade if done by one hand, I remained to be convinced that this was a
good idea for a major literary translation. The problems I foresaw in my
inexperience were of an editorial or logistical nature: how, for instance,
could a general editor contrive to have all the translators speak with one
voice? However, compared to the problems we did encounter, these
imagined ones appear now to be nugatory.

One of my misgivings soon turned into a more serious doubt about the
whole conception of the project, when Penguin opened its website. It was
clear that they thought this website a very bright idea (it was certainly a
handsome presentation) and that they hoped it would be inundated with
visitors' questions and comments, in accordance with their belief that, in
the twenty-first century, everyone was going to be reading Proust. Within a
very short time, it was plain that the site was moribund; it had attracted no
more than a handful of remarks, some of them facetious. As things
progressed, we lost our first Penguin in-house editor, then our second; the
project was eventually seen through to completion by a third. This
completion came to pass more than a year late, in 2002; the delay was
caused, at least in part, by the fact that one or two of the translators were
behindhand in submitting their work. Then, after publication in London, it
became apparent that there were dire copyright problems in America,
where one assumes Penguin had been expecting its largest sales; and when
our six volumes started to appear there, they had to come out piecemeal,
 4

the first part in 2003, my part in early 2004, the next two parts later in
2004. The publication of the final parts will have to be delayed for another
ten to fifteen years, much to the chagrin, I may add, of the translators of
those volumes, to whom all this came as an untoward and disagreeable
surprise. That Penguin did not know beforehand of this American
copyright problem is barely credible. Yet so it seems. That its invasion of
the American market has to be spread over a decade and a half invalidates
much of the decision to translate and publish all the volumes
simultaneously.

I knew nothing about how this project had been conceived within the
house of Penguin or why Professor Prendergast had been chosen to be the
general editor. I have since been told, by another member of the team, that
he was chosen on the strength of a review of the revised Scott Moncrieff-
Kilmartin-Enright translation which he had written for the London Review
of Books ('English Proust', LRB, 8 July 1993). He was to recycle parts [4]
of this review into his General Editor's Preface which appeared in volume
I of the Penguin Proust (The Way by Swann 's, pp. vii-xxi). Once we had
started work on the project and I began to learn more about the general
editor, I began also to wonder why Penguin, to oversee a landmark
translation of Proust, had selected a scholar who had published next to
nothing on Proust and had done little or no translation. However, the
translators he chose were all experienced in one or other, or both, of these
two domains: each of them had done some translation from French, prose
or poetry or both, some of them quite a lot; two of us had actually
translated volumes of Proust, myself and John Sturrock, who had [5]
translated the critical work Cantre Sainte-Beuve (Penguin, 1988); and Peter
Collier had written a book entitled Proust and Venice (Cambridge
University Press, 1989). We learned later that Prendergast had at first
entertained thoughts of engaging writers better known as novelists or
playwrights than as translators, among them Paul Auster; Julian [6]
Barnes; Harold Pinter, the last of whom had once collaborated with the
film-maker Joseph Losey and the noted translator Barbara Bray on The
Proust Screenplay (Eyre Methuen, 1978), never filmed ... What sort of
Proust in English might have eventuated from such a collaboration we
shall never know. Had they brought to their endeavours a notion of the
translator's task at odds with the general editor's increasing predilection
for what he calls the 'foreignizin g conception' (General Editor's Preface,
 5

p. xiv), then they might have encountered difficulties akin to those I had
with the effects of this conception on some of his most important decisions
on matters textual and editorial.

Some of the problems I encountered in trying to collaborate with my

fellow translators and the general editor came undoubtedly from the
naivety of some of my initial expectations. For instance, knowing little
about most of them, I assumed that they would all know about as much as I
did about Proust. Not that I knew a great deal; but I had translated the first
part of Proust, Du cote de chez Swann (Swann 's Way, 1982), I had
published papers on Proust, as well as reviews in journals and newspapers;
and I had taught Proust to advanced students of French (and English)
literature for many years. I also assumed that they would have close to
hand as they worked, as I had, certain more or less indispensable texts:
such as the full text of A la recherche du temps perdu, of course, preferably
in both major Pleiade editions of 1954 and 1987-89; possibly also the Scott
Moncrieff-Kilmartin version in English; the full set of the OED (possibly
on line, as one can have it these days) for the essential duty of avoiding
anachronisms; a passably well stocked library of volumes about Proust; his
complete correspondence in the edition by Philip Kolb; and that at least
they would have access to [8] Le vocabulaire de Proust, Etienne Brunet' s
computerized concordance (Slatkine, 1983). This Brunet title in particular I
assumed the general editor would have to be familiar with, as it would
greatly facilitate his job of cross-checking many things and coordinating
certain usages throughout the volumes. I thought it went without saying
that everybody would in addition be able to consult the best and most
essential dictionaries, that is, the largest of the Robert dictionaries, the
Tresor de la langue fran9aise for [8] nineteenth- and twentieth-century
usages, •for nineteenth-century usages Littre's dictionary and the Grand
Larousse encyclopedique du XJXe siecle. I later discovered that one of the
other translators did not even possess the full text of Proust, had therefore
never read it and worked only with the single-volume concise Petit Robert;
and I tend to doubt that any of them, not excluding the general editor, ever
plied the Brunet concordance.

The Brunet concordance served us well, and led me into my first

dismaying confrontation with some of my collaborators, as follows. After
we were well into the third year of our collective endeavour, nothing had
 6

yet been done by anyone to list or even identify all those key words and
expressions which, because they recur in more than one part of the work,
would have to have a single uniform equivalent throughout our different
volumes. So I went through A l 'ombre des jeunes filles en fl,eurs and
collated all the recurring terms I could think of (including, of course, le
tortillard, le furet and la petite bande, which all occur first in that [9]
volume); and Brunet enabled me to identify the other volumes in which
they recurred. This list, originally of fifty vocables with a suggested
equivalent for each (I eventually expanded it to, I think, sixty-one items) I
sent to the general editor, hoping he would circulate it to all the others and
invite them all to do something similar with their volumes of the work (JG
email to CP, 10.2.99). He expressed gratitude for this, circulated it and
invited all the others to 'add to it' (CP email to all, 21.4.99). In the event,
few of them ever identified any such words in their volumes and some of
them objected in surprisingly testy tones to many of my tentative
equivalents. The main upshot of this genuinely collaborative initiative was
that we did eventually reach a sort of agreement on these equivalents. A
side effect of it was a certain souring of relations among some of us and
perhaps it was also then that there germed in the general editor's mind the
idea that I was trying to usurp his editorial prerogative, which I had later to
deny when he chided me with it. Had I not sent out this list, I wonder how
or when even this degree of uniformity would have been achieved.

Our collaboration turned out to be of two sorts, both of them leaving, in

my view, something to be desired: we had an initial meeting, lasting for
some hours; and we corresponded by email. The meeting was attended by
as many ofus as could make the trip to King's College, Cambridge, though
three of the eventual seven translators were not present. Still, they all had, I
suppose, access to the minutes of the meeting, at which we had broached
notably aspects of the naive assumption shared by some of us that
somehow we could have our multiple voices speak as one, as well as such
individual difficulties as how to translate uniformly very bothersome
frequently recurring terms such as maman, mon amie and hotel (despite [9]
which agreement on the need for uniformity, three or four variants of hotel
turned up in the different volumes). Take maman, the universal French
child's name for its mother: given the period of the novel's setting, the late
19 th and early 20 th centuries, and the social class of the characters, some
possible English equivalents ('mum', 'mummy', the American 'mom')
 7

were equally and excruciatingly implausible. So, for different reasons, was
Scott Moncrieff s 'Mamma'. Although one of the team would have
preferred to keep the French word maman in our English text, agreement
was eventually reached to adopt my suggestion 'Mama'.

As for email, there too I had the naive expectation that we would all be
in frequent correspondence with each other. In fact, I had frequent contact
only with the general editor and with Lydia Davis in New York, with both
of whom I exchanged dozens of messages, over a period of about five
years. One of the seven was not on email, so there was next to no contact;
the four others made scant use of it (CC x 6; JS x 4; PC x 2?; IP x 7). One
of the very first messages I sent to my collaborators was an ingenuous
request for assistance with an intractable sentence of Proust's that I
happened to be working on that day: in my belief that, if any of the others
had requested assistance of that sort, I would have enjoyed the task and
sent an attempt at an English sentence, I was taken aback to receive no
replies, other than one message merely agreeing with me that it was in
truth a tough sentence to translate. Later, there were times when I had an
· unsettling feeling, shared by Lydia Davis in New York, that I was not
privy to certain emails received by some of the others. For me, this
collaboration was inadequate, perplexing and ultimately a source of
chagrin.

I have mentioned the general editor's 'increasing predilection' for what

he calls the 'foreignizing conception'. In the early days of our
collaboration, not having read his LRB piece, I did not notice much of it. It
eventually became so marked that in his General Editor's Preface [4],
when he refers to the 'naturalizing conception', which he sees as being in
conflict with his 'foreignizing conception', he says it is 'demented'
(General Editor's Preface, p. xv). At that point of his discussion, he is
overtly referring only to Terence Kilmartin's statement: 'A translator [10]
ought constantly to be asking himself: "How would the author put this ifhe
were writing in English?"' It is of this working hypothesis of Kilmartin's
that Prendergast remarks: 'if at first glance this looks like a reasonable
benchmark, it is in fact demented.' I should say that this working
hypothesis of Kilmartin's coincides approximately with one of my own
working hypotheses, something well known to the general editor when he
said it is 'demented'. It seems, however, to have been the working
 8

hypothesis of few if any of the other translators, some of whom leaned far
towards a literalism that was well nigh inseparable from the 'foreignizing
conception'. This became apparent in many differences of view we had
over textual matters large and small and was especially marked, I believe,
in the methodologies of Lydia Davis and John Sturrock. On many
occasions, I was struck, nay dismayed, by the taste for literalism not only
of these two but also of some of the others (I say 'some of the others'
because to this day I know next to nothing of the views of two or three of
them, who rarely replied to emails or engaged in discussion of even the
most vexed questions). Far be it from me, however, to say that literalism
and foreignization are 'demented', unless of course, they are taken to the
sort of extremes and reductio ad absurdum that some of the more hostile
among my fellow translators engaged in when arguing against what they
saw as my 'naturalizing conception', saying it would entail replacing all
French cultural allusions, street names, terms for money, names of
characters, etc, with English ones. There may well be something
'demented' at work here, but it's not my conception. When asked to define
my own position in relation to literalism, I have taken to saying I am a
creative fidelicist. As any translator worth his or her salt knows, there is no
incompatibility between fidelity and creativity; we did not need
poststructuralist translation theory, Derrida or Venuti to tell us that no
translation is ever quite 'faithful' and always somewhat 'free' (Venuti, [11]
Introduction to Rethinking Translation, Routledge, 1992, p. 8 and The
Translator's Invisibility, p. 67). Though literalism may be, in some
circumstances, all one can rise to, it is in other contexts, where flying is
required, as useless as a bike; and there very soon comes a time when
every translator must dismount and flex the faithful wings of invention.

Needless to say, Penguin's general editor did not invent this notion of
'foreignization'; there's a lot of it about these days. Actually, there always
was a lot of it about, though it used not to be called that. Before some
theorists made a virtue of it, it could be dismissed as simply bad
translation. It is a principle that flies in the face of much that is often taken
for granted by translators, for instance, that, where possible, they are trying
for effects of meaning, tone and manner equivalent to those made by the
work on those who read it in the original; that the translator's voice should
be unobtrusive; that the translator's language should be fluent and natural,
as English as possible, avoiding translationese; that the cultural other can
 9

be seen to resemble rather than to differ from the familiar. I do wonder

about some of the implications of the principle of foreignization. It seems
generally agreed, from Schleiermacher onwards, that it applies only to
works of literature. Why should this be? Can one imagine producing
foreignized translations of scholarly works on history or child psychology
for example, on economics, international law, philosophy or one or other
of the sciences, works of literary exegesis, a speech by a visiting head of
state or musicological notes on a recording of Wagner's music dramas?
How does one define a difference between foreignization and bad
translation? When Lawrence Venuti translates images d'Epinal as [12]
'popular woodcut illustrations published by [sic] Epinal' (The Translation
Studies Reader, ed. L. Venuti, Routledge, London, 2000, p. 294 ), how do
we know which it is? As language teachers, when we teach French or
Chinese in our schools and universities, using on occasion traditional
exercises like translation to and from English, or when we train translators,
should we be fostering in them a gift for foreignizing? Should we cease
trying to eliminate from our students' work the foreignness of syntax,
grammar and usage which we see as the measure of their comparative
incompetence? I ask these questions in part because, although Penguin's
general editor clearly endorses a principle of foreignization, both in
linguistic and cultural things, he gives little by way of justification of it,
beyond saying things like 'oddly unEnglish shapes [of syntax] are
sometimes the best way of preserving [the] estranging force [of Proust's
extraordinary syntactic [13] structures]' (General Editor's Preface, p. xi).
Do 'oddly unEnglish shapes of syntax' consist, I wonder, with what my
contract with Penguin required of me: that I translate Proust into 'good
literary English'? The general editor's terminology and some of the values
implicit in it are reminiscent of the 'abusive fidelity' advocated by Philip
Lewis ('The Measure of [14] Translation Effects', in Difference in
Translation, ed. Joseph F. Graham, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press,
1985, quoted by Venuti in Rethinking Translation, p. 12) and the 'resistant
strategies' favoured by Venuti himself (ibid., p. 13), which 'help to
preserve the linguistic and cultural difference of the foreign text by
producing translations which are strange and estranging' (loc. cit.). (He
also calls it 'resistancy', The Translator's Invisibility, p. 24 ).

I must say that one of my shrewdest woes, once I was welcomed aboard
and our Titanic was under way, was the gradual discovery that I had fallen
 10

among literalists under the captaincy of a foreignizer. Since publication,

we have certainly had some close calls with icebergs; but, as I was not the
vessel's master, that has been less of a concern for me than seasickness
during the voyage. Here follow some examples of points on which our
conceptions of our tasks were more or less incompatible.

The declared aim of one of my fellow translators, in redesigning Proust's

sentences in English, was to try to match Proust 'comma for comma' [15]
(Lydia Davis's introduction to The Way by Swann 's, p. xxxv). I cannot see
why, when trying to write an English sentence, one would even entertain
the possibility of corseting it, pinning it together, with a system of commas
suited to the syntax of some other language. I aim primarily at writing
English syntax; and it is the syntax which determines its own need for
punctuation. Anything else seems arsy-versy, the tail wagging the dog, the
cart before the horse, and would probably lead me before long to write in
translationese, what John Weightmann once called 'queerspeak'. [16]
Proust's punctuation grew from his syntax, not vice versa. His syntax not
being an effect of his commas, why would that syntax once Englished be
designed as though it were? This same translator looked for ways of
beginning certain English sentences with a preposition, because that's what
Proust did in the corresponding sentences of his French, and believed in
using 'the same word as Proust'. When it was pointed out that 'the same
word as Proust' was by definition a French word, she refined t;'his notion x
into 'the most direct equivalent' of Proust's word. This strikes me as a
principle that flies in the face of the most elementary evidence afforded by
comparative language study, namely that equivalents vary with contexts.
Once one gets beyond the most rudimentary [17] vocabulary (chien = dog,
aller = to go, etc), the principle is as useful as instructions on how to fly on
a bicycle. It is irrelevant to the translating of most adjectives, idiom,
metaphor, gallicismes, colloquialism, lyricism, wit, punning, rhythm of
cadences, emphatic stress, the most elementary idiosyncrasies of syntax or
structuring of sentences, or any of the manifold other aspects of the most
expressive registers of style. This is shown by the niggling but intractable
problems associated with the simplest of Proust's favourite adjectives, doux
(which, in different contexts, can be [17] 'smooth', 'soft', 'sweet', 'gentle', / ~,.,,~:);
etc): I used different adjectives for doux in different contexts, pillows,
cheeks, voices, styles, feelings, music, etc. It is shown too by an example
used by this particular translator, un bon dfner, for which the equivalent
 11

was said to be 'a good dinner'. But what about 'a nice dinner'? Can one see
either of these equivalents as more 'direct' than the other? Is 'perhaps' or
'maybe' the 'direct' equivalent of peut-etre? For the vast majority of
Proust's words, there is no such thing as a direct equivalent; and if one tried
to apply this principle to them, one would be earth-bound, trundling along
on a treadly while flapping one's arms in a pretence of flying.

Take the simple French word cure, which, because it means neither [18]
more nor less than a parish priest or even just a priest, I assumed we would
all want to translate with one or other of those English equivalents,
depending on context. That was not to be; of those who expressed a view,
no one agreed with me; and it is the French word cure that appears,
italicized, throughout our English translation. When I asked in all sincerity
and perplexity what made this French word more untranslatable than other
French words like pain or maison or papier (knowing full well that, though
French bread, houses and paper tend to be very different from their
counterparts in the English-speaking world, we still use 'bread', 'house'
and 'paper' to translate the words), my question was treated as though I
was trying to be flippant or even disingenuous; and the only explanation I
ever received of why a French priest cannot be called a 'priest' in English
was this, from one of my fellow translators: 'I prefer cure over priest
because of all its associations in French life and literature' (LD email
19.4.99), which left me none the wiser. This was not the only French word
used, for reasons which I often disagreed with. Nor could I understand
why, in dialogue between characters, another of my fellow translators
inserts little French appellations like mon vieux and mon petit, rather [18]
than use English equivalents. To sprinkle French vocables through an
English text may be a way of avoiding what Venuti calls 'the ethnocentric
violence of domestication' (The Translator's Invisibility, pp. 20, 61, [19]
etc); but since I could see nothing deserving of the name of violence, I
could see no reason for not domesticating them.

Titles of the various volumes proved to be another bone of contention.

My own view was that each ofus should have the freedom to give a title of
our choice. I know that Lydia Davis, who wanted to avoid Swann 's Way,
the title chosen by Scot Moncrieff in 1922 and recycled by me in 1982
(because it seems to me to be the best title), had to negotiate lengthily with
the general editor before being able to give to volume I the title The Way
 12

by Swann 's, which was not her first choice This title was to be roundly
ridiculed by most reviewers; and when the book appeared in its American
version, Viking insisted on changing it back to Swann 's Way. The title
chosen by Ian Paterson for the last volume, Le temps retrouve, was
Finding Time Again. This title was also unanimously condemned by
reviewers, who all preferred the title dating from the 1920s, Time
Regained, with its echo of Milton's Paradise Regained. For Paterson and
the general editor, it was largely this Miltonian echo that they disliked. I
will not be surprised if, when the time comes for the final volume to be
published in America, Viking insists that its title revert to the Miltonian
Time Regained.

The title I preferred for my part of the work fell foul of the general
editor's bias towards literalism. Proust's title, A l 'ombre des jeunes filles
en fl,eurs, has that quality of poetic suggestiveness that is sometimes
deemed to be untranslatable. Literally translated, this would give 'In the
Shadow [or Shade] of Young Girls in Flower', a title which, I suspect, no
writer of English would ever spontaneously invent for a book about an
adolescent boy falling out of love with one girl then falling in love with a
whole group of other girls. I knew that Nabokov, in his time, had favoured
some such ungainliness; as had Martin Turnell in his book The Art of
French Fiction, but I had put this down to the Russian's notorious wrong-
headedness in matters of translation and to Turnell' s incorrigible lack of
taste. Scott Moncrieff s title for this part was Within a Budding Grove,
with which, though no one apart from him seemed to like it, at least he had
avoided the lengthy literalism. My own title was A Rosebud Garden of
Girls. It was eventually questioned by the literalistic general editor, who
said it would remind readers of Orson Welles. I replied that it would much
more probably remind readers not of Orson Welles but of the lengthy
history in European literature of the gather-ye-rosebuds-while-ye-may
topos, which happens to be Proust's structuring and explicit theme of the
central episode of the Jeunes filles en fleurs. In its favour I also reasoned
that the only flower that Proust ever compares the gang of girls to is the
rose, young roses at that, and that on more than one occasion he even
compares them to a garden. What finally sealed the fate of my title was
that I was unwise enough to tell my collaborators where it came from: half
a line from Tennyson ' s poem 'Maud'. Just as the echo of Milton in Time
Regained displeased the literalists, so did a hint of Tennyson. And so,
 13

against my firmly expressed objection , I was saddled with the ungainly and
risible literalism In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower. For me, my book
- and it is in a minor sense mine, though without ceasing to be Proust' s
- can have no other title than A Rosebud Garden of Girls. I hereby
authorize anyone to strike a small blow for literature, good taste and
creative fidelicism by taking pen and black ink, deleting the obnoxiou s
literalism from the title page of any copy that you happen to see in a
bookshop, in a library, on a friend's bookshelf, and writing in the proper
title.

Two other editorial decisions went much farther than this to foreignize
the English text, on the matters of punctuation in dialogue and of
quotations in French. It was decided, on the original suggestion, I seem to
remember, of John Sturrock, to abandon usual English conventio n for the
punctuation of dialogue, in favour of what was deemed to be Proust' s
system. I confess I never understood the reason for this decision, though if
one ' s aim is to 'foreigniz e' one' s English, then this is certainly a thorough
way of doing so. The general editor enjoined us eventually to follow
Proust's punctuation ' to the letter' . Actually, to speak of Proust's 'system'
is to dignify his practices, which were closer to muddle than to system. The
dialogue of his characters often appears in French as a black slab of text,
unindented for each new speaker, in which a sequence of internal dashes
and infrequent inverted commas enables the accustomed reader to make
sense of which character is speaking [see photocop y 1]. But quite often
Proust does indent for each new speaker, breaking up the long dark slabs of
text [see photocopy 2] ; sometimes he does neither; and sometimes he does
both - the pages of Du cote de chez Swann , for instance, are much more
indented than most of the other parts. One consequence of this way of
punctuating is that the translator feels constrained in using a dash within
the speech of characters, in case it might cause unintended derailments of
the read~r's train of thought, a clear case of the tail (the punctuation)
wagging the dog (the syntax). Another is that ambiguities can easily arise
in any sentence structured like the following hypothetical one, beginning
with a dash and with only a comma after 'she said' :

- I think she is beautiful, she said, with that look in her eye. [21]
 14

This shows one of the potential drawbacks of using such an ambiguous

system in English: how does a reader unfamiliar with this French
arrangement work out whether 'with that look in her eye' are words spoken
by the speaker about someone else, as they could be in French, or whether
they are narrative, describing the speaker? Another is that it further
constrains the translator's choice of syntax, which would not be the case
with conventional English punctuation. Against the idea of borrowing this
French arrangement I argued that Proust's reason for creating his
unindented slabs of dialogue was simply that Grasset, his first publisher,
had told him the original book was far too long and too large to sell as
cheaply as Proust wanted it to sell. So he went through his text, closing it
up, eliminating indentations, narrowing the margins, in the hope of fitting
more words on each page and thus making the book shorter and more
affordable; and this was his sole reason for urging his publisher Grasset to
adopt this mode of setting dialogue ( Correspondance, ed. Kolb, vol. XII,
pp. 185-186, 189-190). In other words, there was no precious aesthetic or
literary reason for it; it was a purely editorial contingency. And in any
case, Proust had as usual been very inconsistent, leaving much dialogue
unindented, while also indenting much of it. Of course, the main reason
against using French punctuation in an English text is the obvious one:
because readers are unused to it, they will find it off-putting, irritating and
confusing. Actually, the system adopted by the general editor is only
French in part: the fact is that French does not use inverted commas as we
do; they use instead chevrons lying on their side and with spaces between
the chevron and the word, as in « maman » [21]. These French quotation
marks are much more visible than the single inverted comma generally
used in British books. When I put to the general editor that someone had
said, on reading a draft punctuated in that way, 'Oh dear- I don't like this
punctuation business - it's so un-English! ', his reply was: 'Some of us of
course don't mind a sense of the "un-English"' (CP's email to me, [22]
26.1.99). Despite my reasons, which I saw as making for a more reader-
friendly English text while contradicting nothing of value in Proust's
practices, we did of course follow the general editor's injunction to the
letter. I expected that this unconventional punctuation would cause ructions
among the copy editors charged with making sense of it; and I eventually
heard something from inside Penguin that made me think this was indeed
the case. (A coda to this battle is that, for the American edition, Viking
New York decided to undo something of this editorial decision: though
 15

retaining the unindented slabs of dialogue, they eliminated the French

dashes and used conventional Anglo-Saxon inverted commas, making the
dialogue more navigable for readers unaccustomed to French practice.)

On quotations in French, something similar happened. It is a fact that

there are in Proust a fair number of quotations from earlier French writers,
Baudelaire, Leconte de Lisle, La Bruyere, Mme de Sevigne, Racine, [23]
Voltaire and many others, both in the form of free-standing lines of verse
and pieces of prose embedded in his own text. There were initially some
diverging views among us on whether we should translate all quotations
into English and relegate the original French to an endnote or leave them in
French in our English text, especially the free-standing lines of verse,
putting an English version of them in the endnotes. One translator arguing
strongly for the latter solution was John Sturrock; one of his arguments,
bearing particularly on lines quoted from plays by Racine the seventeenth-
century dramatist, was that he felt no translation could never equal the
original. He suggested at one point that a solution 'might be to borrow
from an existing translation of Athalie that's worthy of the original,
supposing such a thing exists ' (JS, email [24] 26.4.1999). These two views
struck me, as I said at the time, as an admission of modesty, if not of
defeat: if one is up to translating Proust, why be daunted by Racine? I can
see that a danger with lines of verse is that one risks writing doggerel in
English. But against that, it is not inevitable that a good translator will
write doggerel; and I favour the view that our purpose (perhaps I should
say my purpose?) was to produce an accessible version of a novel for
general readers who have little or no French, not a work of scholarship on
the tragedies or the prosody of Racine. We should therefore provide those
readers with English translations of the verses that were at least serviceable
and set them directly as part of the text, while giving the French original in
the footnotes. A few of the translators found this view all the more
persuasive since Proust's purpose in quoting Racine and other poets was at
times facetious: for example, in Sodome et Gomorrhe, the volume [see
photocopy 3] translated by John Sturrock, there are pages containing three
or four quite lengthy quotations from Racine, one after the other, hijacked
by Proust from a pious biblical context and turned into rather vapid jokes
with homosexual overtones. As Carol Clark said, there is 'loss of comic
effect if we leave Racine in French' (CC, email [24] 20.11.1999). In the
published volumes, there are in fact not footnotes on the same page, but
 16

endnotes at the back of the book. A reader who cannot get these jokes
without detouring via the endnotes four times per page may well think this
is an obstacle course of an edition. There was eventually a clear majority in
favour of translating the quotations in the text. But the general editor
finally chose the other option: that free-standing lines of verse should
remain in French in our English text and that any reader needing an
English version of them should seek it in the endnotes. Two things he said
about this type of decision seem interesting enough to be quoted here.
First, the view that he emailed to me (but not, I think, to the whole group
of translators). The context of this communication was that, to resolve such
a disagreement, the suggestion had been made by at least three of the
translators that all seven of us might vote on it. To this the general editor
replied (to me):

I welcome your urging the others to 'pronounce' on the matter but don't
accept your further gloss of this as 'i.e. vote'. I haven't called for a vote and
don't want to introduce a system of that kind, for the obvious reason that we
could get caught up in unmanageable operations of preference voting across
multiple candidates. So, that is out. I will listen to all opinions and arguments
but will take the final decisions myself. I am assuming that many of these
will accord with majority or consensual views, but in some case they might
not. (CP's email to me, quoted in me to LD 14.11.99)

At one point during our labours, Roger Shattuck commented from America
that Proust was being translated by a committee, a remark intended perhaps
to mock. One difference between us and a committee is that committees
usually vote. (Viking New York decided to remedy this foreignization too
and inverted the general editor's decision, so that in the text of the
American edition all quotations now appear in English and their
translations in the endnotes.)

On this matter of leaving French quotations m French, a second

interesting thing said by the general editor is to be found in his Preface (p.
xvi). By way of justifying his decision to leave the Racine quotations in
French, he says that Proust is 'quoting the highly formal verse of [25]
Racine in the context of the themes of incest and homosexuality.' If true,
this would still appear a curious justification for leaving French verse in
French. Any reader of Proust knows about the theme of homosexuality. But
 17

where, I wonder, is there in Proust a theme of incest? Equally remarkable

to me is the fact that of the two dozen reviewers I have read on the Penguin
Proust, none has been brought up short by the two remarkable claims made
in this statement by the professor of French literature acting as Penguin's
general editor: that there is in Proust a theme of incest; and that this alleged
theme justifies leaving quotations from Racine in the original French.

Comments made by reviewers on the overseeing and uniformizing role of

the general editor were mainly negative. They charged him with three
things: i) a lack of certain uniformities across the different volumes; ii) his
defence of the decision to use seven different translators; and iii) his
defence of 'foreignization' or 'oddly unEnglish' English. Benjamin Ivry
(Washington Post, 7 September 2003), commenting on what he sees as
errors in Lydia Davis's Swann 's Way (the American editors imposed this in
place of her preferred title, The Way by Swann 's), says: 'Perhaps a more
intrusive editor might have caught some of these and other mistakes.' In
Canada, Andre Alexis also commented on a lack of uniformity, especially
uniformity in 'foreignization': '[this is] at times, a translation marred by
just the kind of "naturalizing" Prendergast deplores' ( The Globe and Mail,
4 January 2003). Robert Alter (TLS, 25 October 2002) accused the general
editor of 'inaction' and said of one of his justifications for the use of seven
translators: 'This claim is either disingenuous or simply foolish' and 'looks
like an excuse for having made no editorial effort to bring the sundry
volumes into full stylistic consonance with each other [etc]'. This view was
echoed and taken farther by Peter Craven (The Age, 1 March
2003 ): '[Prendergast' s] wily introduction manages disingenuously to
rationalise the decision to use seven different translators [... ] carefully
worded but it is nonsense' (a two-part criticism, both parts of which
suggest that P. Craven might have read Alter in the TLS before writing it);
and 'What you feel the absence of in the new Proust is a fingertips literary
editor sifting every word. Such a person wouldn't have to bother with the
French, just the English'. Jonathan Patrick, (Scotland on Sunday, 6 October
2002), denounces a 'sophistic argument [for using seven translators]'.
Robert Douglas-Fairhurst (The Observer, 17 November 2002) says there is
a 'curious rationale [for using seven translators]'. Paul Davis, in the
Guardian, took strongly against the general editor's defence of 'oddly
unEnglish shapes [of syntax]', that they are 'sometimes the best way of
preserving [the] estranging force [of Proust's extraordinary syntactic
 18

structures]', saying of this tenet of the general editor 's ' foreignization' 'that
argument smells strongly of academe' , and, of the two volumes translated
by Lydia Davis and John Sturrock, that they ' go well beyond [the] point [of
writing "oddly unEnglish shapes " and being doctrinaire] estranging and
forceful in the sense of making [a translation] sound strange and so forcing
[general readers] to stop reading it' (Guardian , 2 November 2002) Is that
not, simply stated , one of the most persuasive arguments against
foreignization? Lastly, in The Times Higher, 8 November 2002, Richard
Parish, also a professor of French literature, after quoting from Lydia
Davis ' s text Gallicisms, false cognates, overliteral translation,
Americanisms and straightforward mistranslations, asks 'why did the other
translators or the general editor not pick them up? '; he goes so far as to
wonder whether the general editor actually read all parts of the text and all
the endnotes; and he ' [questions] the degree to which this new translation is
in any sense a truly collaborative project'. Richard Parish also asks a most
interesting question: 'Did any of the translators read and revise any of the
other parts of the series, or even one another's endnotes?' This is a novel
and, I think, highly pertinent idea, which certainly was never proposed by
our general editor, who gave at times the·impression of wanting to be more
a general than an editor and to keep the work of his translators separate
from one another rather than bring them together- for example, on one
occasion when I needed to know from him which of her two or three
possible titles Lydia Davis had definitively chosen for Du cote de chez
Swann, so that I could refer to it correctly in my Introduction, which I was
then drafting, he first declined to answer my question, then when I repeated
it refused to tell me (me to CP, 19.4.2000 & 27.4.2000; CP to me,
27.4.2000).

Finally, another thing that no reviewer noticed. Here I permit mysel f a

single adverse criticism on one aspect of our common practice as
collaborative translators, as much a mea culpa as a comment on my fellow
translators and the general editor. It concerns something that we should
have collaborated on, but never did: the speaking voices of the different
characters. It did not strike me until after publication that this was a gross
oversight on the part of all ofus. As we know, a crucial element in Proust's
characterizations is that he is a caricaturist of spoken voices: every single
one of his major characters (like most of the minor characters) has
idiosyncrasies of expression. They are one of the features of Proust's
 19

writing which enable us to recognize his whole novel as comic. In their

mimicry of a voice, they are as amusing and tongue-in-cheek as Proust's
earlier pastiches of Balzac, Flaubert, Sainte-Beuve and the like, as [26]
thematic, perceptive and hilarious as the spoof of the Goncourt s' Journal
which turns up in Le Temps retrouve, in which Proust subverts by parody
all its sy ntaxe nominate and its twee and precious style artiste, and for
which Ian Patterson had the enviable task of trying to find an English
analogue, or rather of trying to create one, since there is nothing close
enough to that style artiste in English, unless it be perhaps the lusher prose
of George Meredith or the l 890ish 'poetical' tushery of Marie Corelli or
Tinsley Pratt crammed with what Oscar Wilde called 'ostentatious
ornamen t... ineffective surplusage' (Speaker, 22.3.1890). In some
measure, Ian Patterson ' s composite problem, that of making comedy by
trying to parody in English a prose style which does not exist in English,
was a mode of the same problem we all had in finding a speaking voice for
each of the characters. We certainly discussed the possibly unsettling effect
on readers of differences in our own narrating voices. But it never occurred
to any of us, I believe, myself included (and certainly never to the General
Editor whose job it should have been) that the translated voice in which
each character speaks was an equally important one. I can speak only of my
volume, in which five major characters stand out in this respect: Odette,
with her Anglicisms and vulgar period trendyisms (such as C'est un rien !
and Ah ! c 'est une bien belle histoire !, for an English analogue of each of
which I sought high and low); Frarn;:oise, with her malapropisms, her
invented words, her below-stairs parlance and peasantries, so to speak;
Bloch, with his precious and excruciating literaryisms; Norpois, the
cumbrous and the sententious; and Charlus with his hysterical fluency in
invective. Voice is, as we know, untranslatable, whether it' s the voice of a
character or of a writer: Mark Twain or William Faulkner and their
characters, once they express themselves in French translation, or Jean
Giono and his in English, by being shorn of their rich regional accents, are
stripped in translation of most of their native charm and left with bare
words. Franc;oise poses the hardest problems, I suppose; with Franc;oise,
one can't win, whatever one does. At times I was myself unsure whether
the voice I was giving her was not too close to Irish or Cockney, each of
which I sensed was as inappropriate as the other; but one must give her an
English voice, it must be a comic English voice and that same voice, I
contend, she should have in all the volumes. Andre Alexis took me to task
 20

in 171e Globe & Mail (Canada, 2 January 2003) for what he calls 'horrid
"gorblimey"-isms' which make her sound, he says, as though she had [28]
'stepped out of Upstairs, Downstairs'. The fact that Alexis says Frarn;oise
is 'a French provincial woman' seems to me to miss an important point or
two: Fran9oise is, more accurately, a peasant woman and a domestic
servant. That being so, Alexis's reference to Upstairs, Downstairs seems to
me quite apt, but not as adverse criticism. Must not the translator try to give
to Fran9oise's speech an Anglophone analogue of her French? And is her
French not markedly more downstairs than upstairs? That I choose to give
her lower-class British speech seems to me, British as I am, writing for
British readers as I do, the least unacceptable of all possible solutions, all of
which are unacceptable in differing degrees. However, since Andre Alexis
implies that a British accent is inappropriate, how, I wonder, would he have
her speak? Like a hill-billy? Like a Newfy, as they say in his part of the
world? Or in no particular style? The absurdity of these suggestions seems
to me manifest. But in the light of this difficulty for a translator, the
unfairness of the criticism, as well as its inevitability, are for this translator
also manifest. George Steiner, on this very question, says 'So little is [29]
being said, so much is "being meant", thus posing almost intractable
problems for the translator' (After Babel, OUP, 1975, p. 34). On Charlus,
one may or may not agree with Steiner's view of it, that 'the discourse of
Charlus is a light-beam pin-pointed, obscured, prismatically scattered as by
a Japanese fan beating before a speaker's face in ceremonious motion'
(After Babel, p. 32), but surely all would agree that Charlus must have in
English an extravagant voice. To Norpois I tried to give one idiolect and set
of mannerisms and to Charlus another. I was gratified to read the general
editor' s opinion of my Norpois: 'I particularly like the rendering ofNorpo is
and his speech' (CP's email 9.10.97). One of the most perceptive and
equally gratifying things said to me about my Swann 's Way in 1982
(spoken by a reader who, though very familiar with Proust in Scott
Moncri effs English, had never realized that Proust was this caricaturist by
speech) was that I had given an individual English voice to each of the
different characters. But in working on Penguin 's Proust it never occurred
to me, or to anyone else, and it should have, that some attempt should be
made to have this spoken style, marked by its individual mannerisms, made
uniform across all the volumes in which each of these characters appears,
reappears and speaks. I remember that, at the meeting at King's College in
January 1998, I did make a mention of the speaking mannerisms of Bloch
 21

in my English. Proust flavours the bookish Bloch's speech with parody of

Leconte de Lisle' s translations of Homer. I replaced some of his Homeric
echoes with Shakespearean, a choice which was rather frowned upon, I
think, by others present, though the difficulty that faced me, as it did Ian
Patterson with the Journal of the Goncourts, was how to make comedy by
parodying a literary style recognizable in French but barely existing in
English. Uniformization might have been difficult, given the gulfs of taste
separating some of us from each other; but it should also have been
possible for us to reach agreement at least on recurring catch-phrases or
idiosyncrasies. So I don't know how the conversation of Odette, Bloch,
Fran9oise, Norpois or Charlus sounds in the other volumes and can only
surmise that they may well speak very differently from the way they do in
my volume. I would expect any reader sensitive to tones of voice to notice
such inconsistency and even find it off-putting.

I conclude by asking whether one can draw any useful conclusions from
this experiment in collaborative 'foreignization' of a major translation? All
I can say is that I suspect the conditions making for the success of a
collaborative translation are similar to those affecting the outcome of any
collaborative enterprise. Such collaboration is no doubt best effected by a
group of people who share methodologies and a common goal, who enjoy
cooperating more than competing, who play by Hoyle's rules rather than
Rafferty's, who have confidence in each other's abilities, who work closely
together rather than apart, who find their loss of autonomy is compensated
for by a feeling of solidarity, who are overseen by someone who can lead
by example, by being expert not only in the substantive task (in this case,
translating Proust) but also in getting on with others, with the aim of
achieving at least consensus among differing points of view. If some of
Penguin' s group of translators satisfied some of these desiderata, it is clear
that it fell far short of others. As for whether the whole Proust project of
collaboration and foreignization has been a success, whose judgment is one
to accept? While many reviewers had praise and censure for different
aspects of the work or for different volumes, none of them praised it as a
collaboration. Quite a few of them even commented on what they saw as
evidence of a lack of collaboration, one of them going so far as to express a
radical doubt about its being in any way a genuine collaboration. The
general editor had predicted that the decision to use [30] seven different
translators 'will doubtless be [the] most controversial feature [of Penguin's
 22
Proust]' (General Editor 's Preface, p. xiv). In fact, it provo ked not
controversy, but near unanimity in condemnation, or rather the general
editor ' s justification of it was roundly rubbished. As for the
'foreignization', of those who noticed it, though they made no use of that
term, all deplored its presence and some compared it unfavourably with the
Scott Moncrieff-Kilmartin-Enright version. I suspect that the success of
translations is made not by reviewers, but by readers; and it is they who
will decide whether the Penguin Proust ever displaces Scott Moncrieff-
Kilmartin-Enright as the preferred text in English.